Pirate Bay jumps on a cloud

The Pirate Bay has announced that it is getting rid of its physical servers and exchanging them for virtual machines spread across multiple cloud services. The move means that by hosting its infrastructure in multiple data centers and even multiple countries the torrent site says it will be impossible to shut down.

While some torrent sites went offline earlier this month after a Swedish police raid of the hosting company PRQ, Pirate Bay was not hit. The outfit claimed that its data flows around in thousands of clouds, in deeply encrypted forms, ready to be used when necessary.

“Earth bound nodes that transform the data are as deeply encrypted and reboot into a deadlock if not used for 8 hours. All attempts to attack The Pirate Bay from now on is an attack on everything and nothing," the outfit claimed.

This is a just a few months since Pirate Bay said it had plans to build aerial server drones using Raspberry Pi computers. However this was a gag and the real plan was to switch from its own infrastructure to those of cloud providers.

If one cloud-provider cuts them off, goes offline or goes bankrupt, the Pirate Bay can buy new virtual servers from the next provider. The Pirate Bay still maintains its own load balancer and transit routers, to hide the location of its cloud providers and encrypt traffic to prevent user data from being exposed, the article states.

The worst that can happen is that Pirate Bay loses both its transit router and its load balancer as all the important data is backed up externally on VMs that can be reinstalled at cloud hosting providers anywhere in the world. All cops can take an any raid is a transit router. If they follow the trail to the next country and find the load balancer, there is just a disk-less server there. In case they find out where the cloud provider is, all they can get are encrypted disk-images."